30 July 2018 12:48 PM

I suppose it’s a step forward. Nobody is seriously claiming that the rampage killer who recently opened fire in a street lined with cafes in Toronto, killing two (including a young child) and hurting many, was a terrorist.

Note (because neither of these reports does) that one of the activities most commonly correlated with mental illness in the modern world is consumption of Marijuana. Note that this ghastly horror took place in the greatest city in Canada, a country which has just very foolishly decided to legalise Marijuana. Does its Parliament have any clue what it is doing? In the New York Times story, which doesn’t of course mention drugs as a direct influence on the crime, or the shooter's mental state, , we learn, very near the bottom, that the shooter’s brother Fahad overdosed on unnamed drugs last summer, ending up in a ‘vegetative state’ at a hospital.

Fahad, it notes, had twice been arrested, once on charges of drug dealing, a crime very rarely committed by people who do not also take drugs. Well, what implications might that have for his brother Faisal's mental illness, now beyond doubt? Not a word.

In fact, it is almost as if the NYT (it is not alone in this) has some kind of repeller device, which keeps it from even examining any link between drug abuse and rampage killing. For instance, it mentions in this story the Nice killer, Bouhlel, whose drug use I have detailed here

….but also seems unaware of this fact. This begins to look like carelessness, especially in a newspaper that prides itself so much on thorough fact-checking.

Last month, I might add, I contacted two reporters at the New York Times whose names were on a story about the Annapolis shooting, asking the following question:

‘Dear X and Y,

‘I am a British journalist, a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday. I try to follow through on rampage killings and other mass outrages in the USA and Europe, and have found a strong correlation (details on request) suggesting that an extraordinarily large number of perpetrators in these cases have been taking psychotropic drugs, legal or illegal.

These include, purely for example, marijuana (Jared Loughner, the Tucson shooter, plus all the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan killers in Paris, and Bibeau, the killer of a Canadian soldier in Ottawa), steroids (Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, the Westminster murderer Masood, the London Bridge murderers Redouane, Zaghba and Butt and the Orlando shooter Mateen) ; antidepressants (the Unabomber, Kaczinski, and Harris, one of the Columbine killers, as well as Lubitz, the German Wings pilot who flew his plane into a mountain); benzodiazepines and Adderall, an amphetamine (Malik and Farook, the San Bernardino killers) .

‘I note from your June 29 report that Ramos, the alleged Annapolis killer, was “ordered not to contact the woman and to continue getting therapy” in return for the suspension of his 90-day jail sentence after pleading guilty to harassment in July 2011. I wondered if you had any idea what the “therapy” was, and if it included any medication. Also if there was any suggestion that Ramos is a user of marijuana or steroids.

Sincerely,

Peter Hitchens’.

I received this acknowledgement: ‘THANK YOU for writing The New York Times newsroom. We are grateful to readers who take the time to help us report thoroughly and accurately. Your message will reach the appropriate editor or reporter promptly.’

No doubt it did. But I never heard another thing.

Although the idea that he might have been a terrorist is still sort-of being toyed with, it’s obvious that Faisal Hussain was unhinged. So far they haven't even been able to find an ‘eyewitness’ who sears he heard him shout 'Allahu Akhbar!’, and there’s yet to be one of those uncheckable claims that he had at some stage and in some way ‘pledged allegiance to Islamic State’ (How can people in the West do do this? Are there booths on high streets?)

Even if there were, I’d caution against drawing too many conclusions. I detail here a very clear example of how a crazy person (also in this case a marijuana user) can try to dignify his fantasies by dressing them up in grand political clothing:

It is frustrating that all this material is readily available to a diligent searcher, and points so strongly in the direction of an inquiry. But the worlds of politics and journalism just don’t seem interested. Indeed, I get abused and misrepresented (most absurdly and insultingly, as an apologist for Islam) when I detail these facts.

29 July 2018 1:59 AM

You may recall the fuss Theresa May made about getting rid of the Islamist preacher Abu Qatada.

In the end it took 11 years of legal wrangling to get this fanatic, with his very nasty opinions, out of the country.

Without her personal intervention at the end, he would probably still be here.

Why, then, is the British Government seriously considering welcoming into this country an unknown number of men who have been – I put this at its mildest – closely associated for several years with an armed faction linked to Al Qaeda, or with others perhaps even worse?

Was all the fuss about Abu Qatada just a public relations front? Or does the right hand just not know what the left hand is doing?

Here’s what is going on. Last week the new Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, put his name to a very odd statement about a very odd event.

I think the nicest thing to say here is that Mr Hunt is a bit inexperienced. The statement said that Britain would be ‘protecting’ a group of ‘White Helmets’, supposedly civil defence workers from Syria. That’s what they call themselves, anyway.

The 400 people involved (a quarter of them said to be ‘White Helmets’) had been caught by the sudden collapse of Islamist jihadi rebel forces in a southern corner of Syria next to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

And, despite the defeated rebels being Islamist jihadi fanatics, they were mysteriously allowed to cross into Israel so that they could escape to Jordan.

Israel? Such people normally regard Israel with violent hatred, a feeling Israel returns with interest.

As far as I can discover, other defeated groups of Syrian rebels and their hangers-on have been bussed under safe conducts to the rebel-held north of Syria, under Turkish and Russian supervision. Why not this time?

Later, the Jordanian government revealed that some of them would now be resettled in Britain. Its spokesman announced that Britain, Germany and Canada made a ‘legally binding undertaking’ to resettle them ‘within a specified period of time’ due to ‘a risk to their lives’. Legally binding, eh?

What was this risk? What were they so worried about? Why do they need to come to Britain when the whole Arab Muslim world must presumably long to welcome these glorious, self-sacrificing heroes?

For, according to the Foreign Office, and many others, the ‘White Helmets’ are the good guys.

They like them so much they have so far spent £38.4million of your money and mine on supporting them.

The FO is in a mess over this. It has for years been backing the Islamist rebels against the Syrian government, a policy which involves supporting exactly the sort of people we would arrest if we found them in Birmingham.

Perhaps that is why it claims the ‘White Helmets’ are ‘volunteers’ (they are often paid) and that they have ‘saved over 115,000 lives during the Syrian conflict’ and done ‘brave and selfless work’ to ‘save Syrians on all sides of the conflict.’

When I asked them to provide independent, checkable evidence for these assertions, they came up empty after three days of searching.

This is not surprising, as the ‘White Helmets’ generally operate only in areas controlled by unlovely bodies such as the Al-Nusra Front, until recently an affiliate of Al Qaeda, and the equally charming Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), famous for putting captured Syrian Army soldiers in cages and using them as human shields.

Independent Western observers, whether they are diplomats or journalists, can’t really go to these zones, because they are quite likely to end up very dead and probably headless.

So you can choose whether to believe the ‘White Helmets’ and their flattering picture of their own goodness, or wonder why exactly they are in such need of protection that these much-feted and saintly humanitarians are willing to be evacuated through a country that most Arab Muslims loathe and despise, rather than rely on the mercy of their own countrymen.

Is it possible (I only ask) that, while undoubtedly brilliant at public relations, and at making slick videos showing themselves rescuing wounded children, the ‘White Helmets’ are not quite as nice as they say they are?

Even the USA, which has for years (like us) helped the Syrian rebels, refused entry to the leader of the ‘White Helmets’, Raed Saleh, when he arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport in 2016. They won’t say why.

The FO tells me that the Home Office, not them, will be vetting those chosen to come here. I hope they are careful when they do so. I am sure that future Home Secretaries will not be grateful if any of the new arrivals turns out to have the same opinions as Abu Qatada.

In any case, it is time the British Government came clean about who it has been helping in Syria.

EXPOSED: THE GREAT GRAMMAR SCHOOL LIE

Enemies of good schools never cease to go on about the alleged cruelty of academic selection.

Why aren’t they just as annoyed about all the other forms of school selection which have replaced it?

Above all there is the icy, utterly unfair finality of selection by wealth. If your parents cannot afford to live in the right area, then you are excluded from almost all the better state schools from the start.

But there are plenty of other things going on. Last week, hardly noticed, it was revealed that state schools are now ‘excluding’ thousands of pupils, often by backdoor methods which do not show up on the books, as well as pushing them off the rolls to boost their exam results.

Selection can happen after the age of 11, as well as before it.

And what do you think all those well-publicised rows about hairstyles and uniforms are really about?

They are schools signalling to their areas that they don’t really want pupils from certain sorts of homes.

Well, can anyone tell me how this is fairer, more open, or better for Britain than selection by ability that still happens in successful, well-educated countries such as Germany and Switzerland?

Any form of selection will hurt somebody. But selection will always happen in some form, so why don’t we choose the fairest and most rational sort?

*******

What a lot of garbage is being talked about Tini Owens and her slightly delayed divorce.

Marriage law in this country is pathetically weak already, and takes the side of the contract-breaker against the spouse who wants to keep his or her promise to stay together.

The only unusual thing about this case is that the deserted spouse is not immediately giving in, as most do, so Mrs Owens can’t get remarried for a couple of years.

So what?

That is all divorce is – permission to get married again, after breaking your original promise.

It is not as if the courts are forcing the couple to have breakfast together every day.

The case is being misrepresented by people who want to get rid of marriage altogether, and replace it with some sort of state-registered partnership, stripped of the ancient power of the Christian marriage vow.

*******

Look, I just thought I’d mention it again as it becomes clearer and clearer that the government is failing to negotiate a deal with the EU. The Norway option, of staying in the European Economic Area, needs no negotiation, would work immediately, and frees us from 75% of EU rules. Why has the government ruled it out?

*******

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

28 July 2018 5:40 PM

Here is a possible counterblast to the Church of England’s horrible Stalinist attempt to suppress and obscure the memory of the late Bishop George Bell, whose memorial in Chichester Cathedral was for some months disfigured with prejudicial ‘safeguarding’ notices, whose name has been stripped from several institutions and schools which it used to adorn and whose statue lies unfinished in a stoneyard at Canterbury cathedral, where he was for some years a most distinguished Dean. All this without anything remotely resembling a fair trial, let alone a finding of guilt.

If you dislike this sort of behaviour, you can do something constructive and rather wonderful, by helping to preserve some unique and rather lovely wall-paintings at the Church of St Michael and All Angels at Berwick (no, not that one) a village in East Sussex close to Virginia Woolf’s old home at Charleston. The Virginia Woolf detail is important, as you will see.

For some months now the campaign to get justice for George Bell has been treading water. Many of you will remember the devastating verdict which Lord Carlile QC pronounced on the Church of England’s kangaroo-court condemnation of the late Bishop.

For anyone unfamiliar with the case, the neccessary information is here . To begin with for the really keen, are almost all the necessary documents

And here is the report by Lord Carlile QC, after which Lord Carlile said to me that, having reviewed the case very thoroughly, this distinguished advocate did not believe he could have won a prosecution on the evidence provided. This is as near as he could come to saying he thought Bell not guilty (since he was specifically not asked to rule on Bell’s guilt or innocence, I wonder why?)

So now let us go back to Berwick, a small, not-very-old church on the edge of the chalk downs of Sussex, chosen by George Bell for an artistic experiment in the 1940s. The full details of this are here

You can discover how George Bell (who loved all the arts and sought to harness them to the cause of Christ in the modern era) persuaded three Bloomsbury artists (not famous for their piety) to decorate the church with wall-paintings depicting Biblical themes. You can see pictures of what they did, many of which I find rather splendid and extraordinarily English, in a way that seemed to die out of our painting after about 1945.

Among them are, as a war memorial, pictures of a soldier, a sailor and an airman which I find extremely evocative. There is the birth of Christ in a Sussex stable, the Supper at Emmaus (to me the most moving moment in the entire Bible ‘Abide with us, for it is towards evening and the day is far spent’) with the chalk hills in the background, and an Annunciation with an English garden visible through the window.

And, which was only just, there is a representation of George Bell himself, his plain clergyman’s face well-depicted, resplendent in his Bishop’s robes. Gosh, I bet there are people who would be happy if that were to crumble away.

tells you how, if you are moved to do so, you can help achieve this. You might want to visit as well, I am told it is a very pleasant part of the country. I certainly plan to do so. But if you can help, what a lovely, quiet, good way of supporting truth justice and the English way of doing things, which does seem to be so very much under attack.

Share this article:

23 July 2018 1:38 PM

I’m always very sorry for journalists or newspapers which break big stories on Saturday mornings. It’s like making a major announcement in the House of Commons during the dinner hour, say around 8.30 p.m. You could probably declare war at that point in the evening, and nobody would notice you had done it.

For reasons impossible to fathom, the British news cycle ends, with a sort of dull thud, at about noon on Saturday. Almost all stories which are current at this time (except enormous scandals) mysteriously die, and are never heard of again. The cycle begins again on Sunday morning (or sometimes late on Saturday night) when the Sunday newspapers appear.

So I am very sad that, as a result of this, a really important piece of news was lost in the Saturday edition of ‘The Times’. The article is of course behind a paywall, so I cannot reproduce it in full.

But those who like me are increasingly concerned at the wider and wider use of ambitiously-titled ‘antidepressants’ muxzst regret that more people did not see it. We need to know just how widely these poorly-researched, medically dubious capsules, whose so-called side-effects are at least as significant as their alleged benefits, are being prescribed to previously healthy people. Or at least to people for whose illness ther eis no objective evidence.

Highlights from the story: ‘Tens of thousands of children are being given antidepressants despite warnings that the pills may harm developing brains for little benefit’.

‘One in six adults in England used antidepressants last year — an increase of almost half a million since 2015.

These totals figures include more than 70,000 people under 18 and almost 2,000 children of primary school age, despite the fact that even the medical profession now thinks that that such pills rarely work in children. One expert remarked that doctors were ‘medicalising adolescence’.

Amazingly, in England 7.3 million people were given at least one antidepressant prescription last year.

One in five people in towns such as Blackpool and Great Yarmouth were taking anti-depressants while in London the figure was less than one in ten.

The article asserted, in my view mistakenly ( see http://bit.ly/1iU0Ow7 and http://bit.ly/1rUu1fN , vitally important and hugely significant studies of the claims made for ‘antidepressants’, made by Dr Marcia Angell) that ‘antidepressants have been shown to work for many patients with severe depression’ and reported that psychiatrists said that part of the rise in use was due to people being more willing to seek help.

Well, maybe that is so, though perhaps the pharmaceutical companies’ enormous promotional budgets and the virtual collapse of old-fashioned analytical psychiatry have something to do with the fact that ‘Prescriptions for antidepressants have doubled in a decade. Britain has the fourth highest use of the pills among western countries, up from sixth in 2013. Such pills cost the NHS £235 million a year, with most types cheaply available out of patent.’

The story was based on Freedom of Information applications by the Times, which is to be congratulated on its work. I just wish they would apply the same diligence to asking about the use of mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, by suicides and by violent criminals.

I also wish they would look at information revealed by US Freedom of Information requests, showing just how weak the evidence is for the effectiveness of these drugs.

The Times quoted Andrea Cipriani, a psychiatrist at Oxford University, as saying ‘These are very, very high figures. People are prescribing antidepressants to people who don't really need them, who have low mood. It's important people are aware that antidepressants aren't a quick fix.’

said that ‘nowadays the risk is medicalising adolescence’ by using drugs to treat depression in young people. He warned ‘We should be careful of prescribing antidepressants to the developing brain’ adding that we don't know the long-term consequences.

I’ll say we don’t. The world’s biochemists have yet to find Aldous Huxley’s magic Soma, the artificial happiness and contentment drug that made ‘Brave New World possible’. I don’t think they ever will, because I don’t think humans were designed or intended to get their happiness out of any kind of packet, jar or bottle.

22 July 2018 1:24 AM

My congratulations to Sir Cliff Richard. By taking the BBC and the police to court over their shocking treatment of an unproven allegation against him, he has struck a mighty blow for justice. I wish all my journalistic colleagues would recognise this and stop carping about a mythical threat to press freedom.

I sympathise with Sir Cliff because I have spent quite a lot of the past few years trying to restore the reputation of a great Englishman, Bishop George Bell, unfairly besmirched after the Church of England publicly revealed ancient and uncorroborated allegations of child sex abuse against him, and appeared to have accepted them.

George Bell has nothing to do with the modern Bishop Peter Ball, by the way, who is a convicted abuser and whose disgusting acts I condemn. By contrast, George Bell (who died in 1958) was never tried, and had no chance to defend himself. Accusations made more than six decades after the alleged offence were lazily accepted by various prelates and apparatchiks, after a sloppy and prejudiced apology for an investigation.

Many otherwise intelligent people assumed his guilt, largely due to an incorrect claim that he would, if alive, have been arrested by the police, who were dragged into the matter by the Church. This would not have been proof of guilt even if true, but it did what it was intended to do, and poisoned many minds against him.

It also helped that several supposedly responsible newspapers, and the BBC, proclaimed prominently that his guilt was established, when it was not. Only the BBC have ever admitted that they were wrong. A dead man has no rights.

My small role in getting justice for Bishop Bell (a battle that is still not over) taught me a lot about the tattered, decrepit state of justice in this country. And here is what I learned. Hardly anyone understands British justice any more, especially the vital presumption that all of us are innocent until proven guilty.

Police actions can prejudice fair trials. Well-publicised arrests and spectacular raids (often, absurdly, at dawn) on homes serve no serious purpose except to shatter the morale of the target and to prejudice the public mind.

Can anyone tell me what South Yorkshire Police actually hoped to find when they searched Sir Cliff’s home in conditions of total publicity in 2014?

The accusation, since dismissed, was that the singer had abused someone at a Billy Graham rally in 1985. I am shocked that any magistrate with any self-respect could have granted a warrant for such a grotesque invasion of a man’s privacy, on such evidence.

I cannot imagine such a thing would have happened 50 years ago, when more people were properly educated and understood what freedom is. But the state has recently gained extraordinary and uncontrolled powers to punish people without proving anything against them.

An allegation, especially of abuse, will ruin the accused person’s reputation forever because millions of people wrongly believe the silly old saying that there is no smoke without fire. He will probably have to spend his entire life savings to fight it. Even if a jury throws out the charges, he will not get a penny of that back. How can this possibly be just? It cannot be, yet we permit it.

I am told that if we are not allowed to report this sort of thing, it will allow the state to persecute people in secret. A simple provision, that such searches may be made public only if the accused person gives written permission, solves that in a second. I believe that the police, deprived of the oxygen of publicity, will simply stop behaving like this.

What is the point of turning up at dawn with a dozen cars with flashing lights if it can’t be shown on TV? You might as well do what you should have done in the first place, and ask the accused to come round to the station.

AS FOR the argument that these actions cause ‘other victims’ to come forward, the claim itself is an example of the ignorant prejudice of our times. Not all accusations are true, as we have learned quite a few times lately.

They are not ‘victims’ but ‘alleged victims’, until the case is proven beyond reasonable doubt in a fair court of law. And why can they not come forward when the accused is formally charged and arrested?

I may in the past have wondered whether Sir Cliff was worth the fantastic amounts of money he has earned from his long career. Now I don’t begrudge him a penny. It was only thanks to his huge wealth that he was able to fight and win a battle that badly needed to be fought.

Now everyone who cares for liberty and justice must see that his efforts are not wasted.

---

Crooks are laughing at our ‘cardboard courts’

Do you remember a few years ago when we were all assured that crime was on the way down? It was all lies, of course, an illusion achieved by reclassifying millions of crimes as non-crime. Now crimes we can’t ignore, especially stabbings, are obviously increasing.

I cannot myself see how this can be because there are fewer police, since the police are invisible anyway. But how about this for an explanation? A 19-year-old in my home town recently tried to rob an old lady while threatening her with a broken bottle. The judge gave him a suspended sentence, telling him he’d be jailed if he got into trouble again.

Two weeks later, the same youth smashed up a pub. The same judge said he could not believe that the youth had acted as he had. And then he did not send him to prison. I wonder what will happen next. I haven’t named either of these people because it would be unfair to do so while not naming the other morons in all the other hundreds of similar cases in the past few months all over the country, which haven’t been reported.

Our justice system is made of cardboard. The criminals are beginning to catch on. You’re on your own.

---

Super-funny superheroes are a blast

I love The Incredibles, not because of their superhero stunts but because of their brilliant, belly-laugh-inducing wit about real life. Even if a man has superpowers, in fact especially if he has superpowers, he can't really substitute for a trained mother if she has to go out to work.

He can still be utterly defeated by a tiny child who doesn't want to go to bed yet, or by a bigger one who doesn't want to eat his broccoli. As for handling a stroppy teenage daughter, being stronger than a speeding locomotive doesn't count for anything.

Nor does it stop him buying AAA batteries when he was supposed to buy AAs (yes, you've done that too). Subversive, incorrect, genuinely funny - see it before they ban it.

---

Who are these lunatics who want a second referendum on the EU?

Didn’t the first one do enough harm, offering us a short cut to paradise and leaving us stranded in the rain on

Beachy Head? Recognise that the whole thing is a mess, and go for the Norway option, while you still can.

You’ll find it makes sense, if you only look at it…

---

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

21 July 2018 12:05 PM

Almost a year ago, I published this reflection on the life and work of Geoffrey Wellum, a remarkable survivor and witness of the Battle of Britain who, extraodinarily, lived on into our own less courageous era. His death was announced last night and I am republishing the article in his memory:

As I grow more and more disenchanted with the myths about World War Two, what do I think about those, such as my own father, who took part in it and endured hardship and danger in defence of this country? Actually, my respect and admiration for them grows. They had all been through the 1930s, that ‘low, dishonest decade’. They had, almost always, a poor political and strategic grasp of the events that were to engulf this country. They had not been prepared in any serious way for what they had to face. Those who suddenly called upon them to fight and possibly die, were themselves too old to face the consequences of their own policies. In many cases, young men's ability to cope with war, and fight it effectively, depended on the apparently indestructible layer of career officers and NCOs who keep all the armed services going. I am very worried that current foolish cuts in defence spending are driving these reliable, disciplined, quiet professionals away.

But in 1939, they abounded. My father was one of them, already entirely used to the day-to-day business of keeping a warship ready to fight, and standing on the shoulders of centuries of forerunners, who had created a naval tradition of competence and discipline that was immediately ready for conflict.

So, by great good fortune, our three armed services in 1939 were living, breathing organisms, capable of taking young men and training them to the arts of war.

The task they faced is beautifully described in a memoir recently lent to me by a colleague, Geoffrey Wellum’s diaries, deftly turned into a book, of his transformation from schoolboy into Spitfire pilot. (First Light, Viking, 2002)

It took Geoffrey Wellum DFC (who last week celebrated his 96th birthday) a long time to get into print, many decades after his extraordinary, intense years often just inches from death. And it took me quite a while to open his modest volume. I had hesitated to read the book, having had a bit much of the adulation of ‘The Few’ in my lifetime. I’ve seen the films, listened to the music, heard the speeches, sometimes wondered if it was all that it was said to be . Indeed, Richard North’s recent ‘The Many not the Few,’ (Continuum 2012) while not detracting from the bravery of the flyers, casts some doubt on the standard account. I don’t know if I agree with his view, that the real conflict in 1940 was over morale more than anything else, and that Hitler’s aim was to bomb us into a demoralised peace, rather than risk an invasion - but it is powerfully made and adds greatly to one’s knowledge of the times.

Be that as it may, Geoffrey Wellum’s story shows how ill-prepared we were. He was a schoolboy of 17 at a minor public school on the borders of Essex when he applied for RAF flying training in the last Spring of peace, 1939, having little idea what he was letting himself in for.

What follows is completely captivating, because it is so honest and so true to himself. He is completely candid about his failings, about the angry exasperation of his instructors when didn’t work or concentrate hard enough. He gives those instructors credit for their patience and enormous, unflappable skill, earned over long years when nobody cared about the RAF at all, which made his training possible. He never makes himself out to be anything special. From time to time he pauses to grieve for friends who die, in training or in combat. But, though the loss is obviously always there, and he thinks frequently of his lost friends in their graves or at the bottom of the sea, he has to keep flying and fighting, and so puts it to one side so that he can carry on. The unthinkable possible consequences to his mother and father (he was an only child) are also lightly mentioned but not dwelt upon, much as people of those generations handled such things at the time. And so the reader feels them, painfully but without mawkishness.

His descriptions of what it is like to fly are lyrical and moving because he is not trying to be lyrical or moving. His pre-1939 upbringing and schooling full of Hymns Ancient and Modern, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Kipling and half-grasped Divinity lessons, (not wholly different from what I went through 30 years later, as a sort of straggler) flavour his otherwise unfussy prose.

He is often concerned about God, whether He is present, what He thinks of the war, whose side He is on, but in a practical and untheological way. As he first gets the hang of flying on his own, he writes of one of the stranger effects of the sheer joy of it. ‘There is no longer any doubt that some omniscient force understands what life is all about. There are times when the feeling of being near to an unknown presence is strong and real and comforting’.

His description of the dangerous flying training, of the terrors of night flying, of watching friends crash are potent and raw, despite the long years since these things happened. The sudden acceleration of the war, after Dunkirk, and the absurd confusion through which he eventually becomes a Spitfire pilot are completely credible.

The sections on the Battle of Britain itself completely lack boastfulness. Errors and foolish actions (in which he nearly dies) are faithfully recorded, misses listed as well as hits, horrors, briefly glimpsed, not concealed. His occasional irritation with his orders is not concealed. The growing, choking fear that he may not return from a mission in thick cloud with poor visibility and failing light is perfectly communicated.

But the story-telling is so good that the reader can completely understand that flying Spitfires against a dangerous enemy is terrifying, involves long hours of boredom and frustration, is utterly exhausting, repeatedly causes the abrupt and ultra-violent deaths of good friends – and yet is one of the most supremely satisfying tings any man could possibly have done. The sheer delight of flying an aircraft as near-perfect for its purpose, as the Supermarine Spitfire then was, is wonderfully expressed. I wish I could have done it (though I know perfectly well that I could not have done).

I could not stop reading it once I had begun, and had to force myself to lay it aside for work, and other essential things.

At the end, the schoolboy is very much a man, who has been lifted into an intensity of life that he will probably never repeat for the rest of his days. And yet, unlike so many of his fellow-pilots, he must carry on living in the mundane earthbound world, with the flash and swoop and roar and soaring flight of his Spitfire years always on the edge of his memory and thoughts.

How, after all that, do such men cope with the banalities of commuting, and suburbs and pensions? I have never known the answer. I do know we should have made and kept this a much better country than we have done. If people are prepared to do this sort of thing to defend it, they really deserve better than what we have got. How embarrassing that such a man should still be here to see the tawdry thing Britain has become.

Share this article:

20 July 2018 9:22 AM

The Bow Group has now provided the second part of the recording of the meeting at the House of Commons where I attacked the growing tendency in politics to accept the feeble arguments for the legalisation of marijuana:

Share this article:

19 July 2018 9:43 AM

In response to public demand, here are the rules by which this blog seeks to keep its comment threads civilised and lawful:

We fight a constant battle here (not always successfully) to keep the unhinged away. I have many times explained the moderation of comments here. I can't help it if nobody pays any attention, or if everyone thinks I am lying. Here is how we do it:

The site is published in London by a British newspaper company and therefore must abide by the laws of England, which are more restrictive of certain types of speech than those of the USA.

. Posting under multiple names is not allowed.

Postings longer than 400 words are strongly discouraged and not normally permitted, but may be allowed if natural justice requires it (as when a contributor has been criticised at length by me).

Coarse and offensive language is not permitted. I am the sole and final judge of what constitutes coarse and offensive language.

Telling falsehoods about me or about other contributors is not allowed. Time is permitted for correction of such falsehoods, but if it is not done in time, the contributor will be excluded. In general, persistent breach of any of these rules will get you excluded.

Crazy and incoherent postings, and commercial advertisements, are not allowed

I am not personally in charge of selecting or posting comments, a task handled by Mailonline moderators, though I sometimes intervene in the case of what I regard as errors or injustices. The moderators of Mailonline have a very hard job to do and sometimes forgiveably err on the side of caution. Contributors should keep copies of their postings, if they want to complain about injustice.

Share this article:

18 July 2018 4:18 PM

Long ago, when flying was expensive and trains were cheap, and there was no Channel Tunnel, and Amsterdam was not yet mainly famous for marijuana, I went to what we then called ‘Holland’, travelling from Harwich to the Hook.

It was a radical change. Until then, my foreign journeys (including a ride on the now-forgotten ‘Golden Arrow’ from London to Paris in 1965) had always begun at the rather tatty and unromantic Victoria Station. This started at Liverpool Street, in some ways my favourite London terminus with its fascinating First World War memorial to Captain Charles Fryatt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fryatt), whose extraordinary judicial murder by the Germans was an example of the ‘frightfulness’ with which we associated them even in the relatively civilised combat of 1914-18.

Liverpool Street, being in the serious City, used, for me, to have a slightly thrilling air of distilled power and retained - far later than the rest of London - the Edwardian Imperial grandeur of the capital. It was not really a holiday place. In those days it also gave a glimpse of other bits of the past – first, the enormous ‘Improved Industrial Dwellings’, great dingy workers’ barracks which crowded down to the edge of the line (if these grim blocks, dispiriting whether shrouded in drizzle or baking in the sun, were ‘improved’ what had it been like before?); then the perfectly preserved 1920s stations of unfashionable suburbs such as Maryland and Forest Gate, with their once ultra-modern blue name plates and cream tiles, on which you might have expected to see moustached city clerks in celluloid collars and bowler hats, straight out of the era of Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. London could not then afford to discard the past as it has since. And then the wistful, forgotten East Coast, facing towards that part of Europe which leads (if you keep going far enough) to Moscow and then on to China, not to frivolous France, the gateway to the Latin lands and the Mediterranean.

Setting out for Harwich for the boat to the Hook was a more puritan journey than those to Dover, Folkestone or Newhaven. I think I had always preferred these Eastern Approaches, and was thrilled, when I arrived, by the serious dark brick and Protestant aspect of the Netherlands, under sombre skies.

I was also influenced by one of my favourite films, Hitchcock’s ‘Foreign Correspondent’, set in the last days before war broke out in 1939, in which the hero and heroine, having stumbled across evil Nazi plotters in Amsterdam, escape their sinister pursuers on the Harwich boat, actually pulling away from the quay as the villains run towards the gangplank. I had perhaps still hoped to find that slow, quiet Holland of narrow, ancient streets, canals, somnolent grey afternoons perfumed with the aromas of strong coffee and cigar smoke, and of course windmills (Those who have seen ‘Foreign Correspondent’ will know just how important –and rather sinister – a windmill can be). But these things only survived as shadows. The modernisers had, as usual, got there before me, with their concrete and their bright lights and their straight lines.

But I still like it, and have been back more than once. I have also come to like the very similar and rewarding Flemish part of Belgium, likewise full of beguiling towers, first-rate steak and chips, glorious art, and excellent railways.

But of course it has another aspect. On my first visit to Amsterdam, the guidebooks and travel-writers urged me to visit the red light district with its prostitutes sitting in illuminated windows, then a sign of the Netherlands’ much-advertised liberalism. They did not warn me of how distressing the sight would be, even to me, in those days a supposedly liberated ‘progressive’ who ought not to have minded.

The drugs would come later, and I often think, when I meet the kind of modish person who likes to proclaim that he is ‘European First, British second and English last’ that it is the Netherlands that such people dream of as the model and example, with its allegedly relaxed morality, its state multiculturalism and its modernity – a sort of Europeanised, welfare state version of the USA. Even the motorways, perhaps the most hideous artefacts of modern man, have a sort of niceness about them, as if they had been designed by Dick Bruna and all the lorries are being driven by Miffy. They weren’t. They aren’t.

It’s a bit beguiling. But only a bit, and , as I confirmed last week on a visit (by train) to the Calvinist ‘Green Heart’ of the Netherlands around Gouda (north of Rotterdam, south of Amsterdam, east of the Hague) , plenty of Dutch people loathe permissive Amsterdam and are exasperated that foreigners think that city is typical of their way of life.

I was there to launch a Dutch translation of my book ‘The Rage Against God’, now eight years old and the last relic of a public argument about religion which I had with my late brother. Of all my books this is one of two (the other is my 1999 ‘Abolition of Britain’, about to be reissued with a new introduction) which continues to sell reasonably well. I have met people in Australia who have read it, and in North America, but it came as something of a surprise when the wonderfully named Blauwe Tijger (Blue Tiger) publishers approached me with plans for a Dutch edition.

Last week I went out to the Netherlands to launch it, on the banks of a canal in Gouda (oddly enough, in trying to pronounce this city’s name in a ‘foreign’ way, we get it completely wrong. The locals call it ‘Xhowda’. I gave a short talk (probably too pessimistic for my audience) and answered some questions, at a meeting in the melancholy setting of Gouda’s former synagogue, now a church. This sort of memory is sadly common all over the country, where (unlike in neighbouring Germany where most synagogues were destroyed in November 1938 during ‘Kristallnacht’) the Jews were wiped out - but their homes and temples left standing, as a terrible, howling reproach which darkens even the brightest day if you let yourself consider it. This was actually done. Good people were powerless to stop it.

Maybe this is the impulse behind the frenzied modernity of much of the Netherlands. The pleasant and comfortable small town where I stayed (I won’t name it, because I selfishly don’t want anyone else to discover its modest delights) had suffered a dreadful rebuilding in the 1960s – not because of war damage, but, I suspect, just because of this desire to be modern, and to erase a past that might have been more beautiful, but was full of unwanted ghosts. The Hague, the country’s seat of government, must once have been a lovely sylvan city of parks, lakes and elegant ministries, courthouses and embassies. But arrive at its huge, ultra-modern central station and you are confronted with aggressive cuboid newness, stealing great chunks of the sky with glass and masonry. One colossal hotel was even called ‘Babylon’. Generally I have quite a good sense of direction but the festival of concrete around me was so violent that I completely lost all bearings, and had to ask for directions despite having both a map and a compass. The problem was, I couldn’t believe what the compass was telling me.

At last I found the pretty part, where the old Royal picture gallery, the Mauritshuis, stands next to the parliament buildings and a little lake alive with waterfowl. This is a very fine small gallery, housing both Vermeer’s beloved ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ and his plangent ‘View of Delft’, a clear window into the irrecoverable tranquillity of another time. And there I had the great privilege of watching the restoration, tiny square by tiny square, of Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Lamentation’, a depiction of the lifting of Christ’s broken body down from the Cross at Golgotha. The picture is, literally, unvarnished, and glows as if freshly-made. The grief of Mary Magdalene, on the far left of the picture, is powerfully portrayed. Some of you will remember my experience, recounted in ‘the Rage Against God’ of seeing Van Der Weyden’s equally superb but quite different ‘Last Judgement’ in the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune . That communicated fear. The Lamentation communicates sorrow.

Having spent the whole morning being interviewed, and determined not to waste a second of my visit, I had just time to hurry to the station and rattle down to Delft, where I was shown the spot from which Vermeer painted his ‘View’ - alas, the handsome buildings in the foreground of the painting are gone – and then to visit the two great churches of Delft, which is perhaps the most wonderfully-preserved of all the Dutch cities. Both the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Churches are a little bare by Anglican standards (the Reformation here was more ruthless than ours) but I especially enjoyed the lavish tomb of Admiral Maarten Tromp, and that of Piet Hein, Dutch seadogs I was brought up to respect. There were plentiful gloomy skulls, those fierce reminders of the inevitability of death that we don’t much like to see these days (though some English churches also still display them). And beneath the huge, heavy stones of the ‘New’ Church is the sealed family vault of the Dutch Royal Family, which hardly any living person has seen the inside of, and which is opened briefly only for royal funerals.

Then I climbed as high as I could up the enormous tower of the New Church, hoping to find some glorious Ruysdael landscape of castles, woods, flapping herons and small gabled towns, but seeing instead the great looming hazy wasteland of modern industry and trade, cuboids glittering everywhere - for Rotterdam and all around it have grown hugely wealthy and busy thanks to their very close links with the roaring engine of German economic power next door.

Ah, yes, Germany, always an awkward subject on the Continent. On my way back home, via Brussels, I had to change trains in Rotterdam, whose ancient lovely centre was burned to nothing in a German air-raid in May 1940, a raid specifically designed to terrorise the Dutch government into surrender (the fighting on the ground had not gone that well for the supposedly all-conquering Germans, and they had lost patience). That day was the end of the Old Netherlands, I think.

There is an archive photograph of citizens standing in silent dismay, a short distance south of the burning heart of their city, on that awful day when what they had thought was the modern, civilised, tolerant world was turned into an era of murderous twilight by rivers of grey steel punching across their borders and cruel bombing planes, state-sponsored arsonists and terrorists, screaming across what had been the tranquil sky, dropping death on their fellow-citizens and destroying their familiar beloved land. What can they have thought and said?

The picture shows them on open ground next to an interesting modern building, very advanced by the standards of 1940. It is the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, an unjustly neglected treasury of beauty.

Displayed in it now (I do not know if it was there in 1940, but I like to think it was) is one of Pieter Bruegel the elder’s two surviving paintings of the Tower of Babel (the other is now in Vienna). I have had the good fortune to see both of them, and find they colonise and persist in the mind, like recurring dreams. In my view the Rotterdam picture is the more powerful and beautiful of these two warnings against human vanity, the Judeo-Christian version, perhaps, of the Classical myth of the Fall of Icarus. The tower penetrates the clouds, but is already crumbling and (as we know) will never be finished. Hotel Babylon, indeed. The modest beauty of the churches of Delft, built to the Glory of God, seems more likely to me to survive , and will always be more beautiful than the great extravagant towers of modern Europe, raised to the glory of man.